College and Research Libraries
Library Growth and Academic Quality
THE LATE FREMONT RIDER's famous ob-
servations and conclusions on library
growth1 were re-examined in a recent
article by H. William Axford in this
journal.2 Axford sought to find whether
or not the growth of university libraries
since 1946 was maintaining the pace
Rider found typical for the period be-
fore 1940, and whether or not Rider's
warning that libraries must double in
size every fifteen or twenty years in order
that their parent institutions might con-
tinue to maintain high academic rating
is indeed valid. Axford found that uni-
versity libraries, in the period 1946-1960,
were not growing at a rate which would
permit them to double in size every
fifteen years, but at only 78 per cent of
this rate. He concluded also that "Rider's
emphasis on the relationship between
the rate of growth of the university li-
brary and the over-all quality of the edu-
cational program is still essentially cor-
rect."3 An examination, however, of the
methods whereby Axford's data were
chosen, used, and interpreted, may well
lead to different conclusions and further
questions.
It is regrettable that the study of li-
brary size and library growth rates is
hampered by deficiencies in the quality
of available library size and growth sta-
tistics. All libraries do not count their
holdings in exactly the same way; neither
do counting practices in a given library
necessarily remain unchanged through-
out its history. Progress in intermural
1 Fre mont Rider , "The Gro.wth of American College
and University Libraries-and of Wesleya n's" Abo u t
B ooks at th e Oli n Library, W esleyan Univer sity, XI
(1 940), 1-11.
2 H. William Axford, " Rider Revi s ited, " CRL ,
XXIII (196 2 ) , 345-47.
a Ibid. , p. 347 .
MAY 1963
Bv GEORGE PITERNICK
Mr. Piternick is Assistant Director of Li-
braries at the University of Washington, Se-
attle.
and intramural standardization has been
and is being made; the benefits of each
improvement in standardization can be
felt, unfortunately, only in statistics gen-
erated subsequent to its adoption. Never-
theless, library size statistics, if worth
gathering . and publishing, are worth
using-the degree to which conclusions
may be invalidated by flaws in the data
must, however, be always considered.
American university libraries whose
holdings exceeded one million volumes
by June 30, 1960, were used by Axford
in his study of the first of Rider 's axioms
-that college and university libraries,
on the average, double in size about
every fifteen -:years. Axford's Table 1
illustrates the growth of each of these
libraries in the period 1946-1960, ex- .
pressing it as percentage increase during
the period. Presumably a percentage in-
crease of 100 during the period would
constitute doubling. Several facts, how-
ever, complicate this simple comparison.
For one thing, the interval is fourteen
years instead of fifteen as Axford as-
sumes. Second, the listed library holdings
for 1946 are not internally consistent.
Some are taken from the July 1947 issue
of College and Research Libr~ries~ others
from the 1945 edition of the American
Library Directory. The figures in the lat-
ter publication could apply to the year
1945 at the latest, and frequently refer
to a date two or three years earlier.
223
Third, the "average percentage increase"
of 78 per cent, as printed, is an un-
weighted arithmetic average of individ-
~al percentages and hence of dubious
relevance. Last, several errors in listing
and computation are detectable.
Table I in this paper offers, in revised
form, the growth characteristics of the
academic libraries Axford selected for
study for the period 1946 to 1960. The
holdings data for 1946 have been ra-
tionalized; they are taken from the July
1947 issue of College and Research Li-
braries, supplemented when necessary by
data taken from the Princeton Statistics
for College and University Libraries for
1945-1946. For each library, the average
annual growth rate has been computed as
has its corollary value, the doubling time.
Doubling time is here used to represent
the period of years necessary for a li-
brary's holdings to double at the aver-
age annual growth rate for the period
studied. Table I also shows the growth
characteristics of these libraries during
the same number of years (fourteen)
immediately preceding the dates of Ax-
ford's comparison period.
For the period 1946 to 1960, the li-
braries under study have grown at wide-
ly differing rates. Their mean growth
rate during this period has been 20.1
years, which, to be sure, indicates a slow-
ing down from Rider's average of fifteen
years. However, there has been no per-
ceptible slowing down in growth rate
for these libraries over the previous pe-
riod of fourteen years. Their mean dou-
bling time between 1932 and 1946 was
20.7 years. Attention is again invited to
the wide variation in individual growth
rates.
In using this ranking as a gauge of
over-all academic quality Axford, in his
Table 2, did not rank the institutions ac-
cording to the Keniston-Berelson rating
as he intended, but instead in alphabeti-
cal order within two rank clusters used
frequently by Berelson; t<?P ten (with
the addition of M.I.T. and CalTech)
and second ten. Also, Axford's conclu-
sion, as mentioned earlier, was evidently
arrived at by inspection only.
But is Axford's sample typical? His
libraries are, after all, the twenty-five
largest university libraries, and there-
fore not likely typical of all university
libraries. Moreover, Axford's sample is
not identical with the sample upon
which Rider based his conclusions, al-
though there are many libraries com-
mon to both. A restudy of Rider's sam-
ple of twenty libraries (Table 2) shows
that their growth rate has definitely de-
creased. His first group of ten "represent-
ative" large university libraries of re-
spectable age he found to have had an
average doubling time of sixteen years
between 1831 and 1938. Their mean
doubling time between 1938 and 1960
was 25.1 years. The second group of ten
more recently founded university librar-
ies he found to have grown at an aver-
age doubling time of 9.5 years (actually
10.9 years) between 1876 and 1938. Their
average doubling time was twenty-two
years between 1938 and 1960. Again, the
individual variation is very large.
It appears, then, that any conclusions
about the average growth rate of aca-
demic libraries must depend largely up-
on the libraries chosen for study, and
the period during which their growth
is studied. Certainly the variation in
growth rates is very large. In the twenty-
five libraries constituting Axford's sam-
ple we find doubling-time values rang-
ing all the way from 9.3 years (UCLA,
1932-1946) to 43.7 years (Yale, 1946-
1960).
That the growth in size of academic
libraries is exponential rather than lin-
ear cannot be doubted. Or, put another
way, it is clear that every library nor-
mally tends to add, during a given year,
more volumes than it added during the
preceding year and fewer than it will
add the next year. It is not clear, how-
224 COLLEGE AND RESEARCH LIBRARIES
Library Holdings
19 32
(volumes)
Harvard 3,341,700
Yale 2,130,600
Illinois 1,113,733
Columbia 1,358,389
Michigan 839,338
California (Berkeley) 802,817
Cornell 877,393
Chicago 1,012,5·35
Minnesota 682,894
Pennsylvania 773,843
Princeton 678,299
Stanford 567,243
California (Los Angeles) 191,250
Duke 307,601
Northwestern 418,098
Wisconsin 441,500
Ohio 395,725
Texas 436,224
Indiana 247,320
Johns Hopkins 423,501
New York .
Washington (Seattle) 316,136
Brown 430,683
Iowa 352,192
Missouri 292,268
Mean 767,970
TABLE 1
RECENT GROWTH OF UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES
(after Axford, 1962)
Average
Annual Doubling
Holdings Growth Time
1946 1932-46 1932-46
(volumes) (per cent) (years)
4,804,968 2.6 27.0
3,5 39,596 3.7 19.1
2,003,622 4.3 16.5
1,778,058 1.9 36.8
1,267,518 3.0 23.4
1,378,602 3.9 18.1
1,206,19·5 2.3 30.5
1,584,264 3.2 22.0
1,422,529 5.4 13.2
1,033,794 2.1 33.3
1,058,920 3.2 22.0
952,051 3.8 18.6
543,281 7.7 9.3
740,493 6.5 11.0
788,832 4.6 15.4
600,000 2.2 31.9
709,875 4.3 16.5
801,637 4.4 16.1
617,947 6.8 10.5
737,760 4.0 17.7
715,157
594,320 4.6 15.4
665 ,041 3.2 22.0
665,930 4.7 15.1
525,557 4.3 16.5
1,229,438 3.4 20.7
Average
Annual Doubling
Holdings Growth Time
1960 1946-60 1946 -60
(volumes) (per cent) (years)
6,697,111 2.4 29.2
4,394,988 1.6 43.7
3,28t3,158 3.6 19.6
2,875,761 3.5 20.1
2,818,341 5.9 12.1
2,503,060 4.4 16.1
2,116,230 4.1 17.3
2,094,824 2.0 35.0
1,968,101 2.3 30.5
1,665,114 3.5 20.1
1,626,537 3.1 22.7
1,592,287 3.7 19.1
1,464,308 7.3 9.8
1,435,164 4.8 14.8
1,429,431 4.3 16.5
1,384,222 6.2 11.5
1,369,348 4.8 14.8
1,350,671 3.8 18.6
1,317,269 5.6 12.7
1,159,747 3.3 21.3
1,067,946 2.9 24.2
1,060,086 4.2 16.8
1,025,479 3.1 22.7
1,021,441 3.1 22.7
1,002,263 4.7 15.1
1,989,115 3.5 20.1
Library Holdings
1831
(volumes)
Harvard 39,605
Yale 25,500
Columbia 4,580
Princeton 8,000
Penns ylvania 2,000
Brown 11 ,662
North Carolina 4,800
Virginia 8,000
Rutgers 6,500
Georgetown 7,000
Mean I 11 ,764
Library Holdings
1876
(volumes)
Chicago 18,000
California (Berkeley) 13,600
Illinois 11 ,000
Cornell 39,000
Minnesota . . 10,000
Western Reserve 10,000
Iowa 8,823
Oberlin 14,000
Rochester 12,000
Syracuse 10,000
Mean 14,642
TABLE 2
GROWTH OF COLLEGE AND UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES
(after Rider, 1940)
a) Represe ntative Large University Libraries
Average
Annual D oubling
Holdings Growth Time
1938 1831- 1938 1831-1938
(volumes) (per cent) (years)
3,941,359 4.4 16.1
2,748,000 4.5 ° 15 .7
1,615 ,051 5.6 12.7
919,555 4.5 15.7
881,781 5.9 12.1
530,290 3.6 19.6
357,629 4.1 17 .3
303,502 3.5 20.1
273,873 3.6 19.6
258 ,700 3.4 20 .7
1,182,974 4.4 16.1
b) Recently Founded University Libraries
Average
Annual Doubling
Holdings Growth Time
1938 1876-1938 1876- 1938
(volumes) (per cent) (years)
1,232,745 7.1 10.1
1,141 ,612 7.2 10.0
1,130,000 7.8 9.2
1,035,170 5.4 13.2
I ,017,690 7.7 9.3
508,000 6.5 11.0
441,396 6.5 11.0
386,664 5.5 12.9
329,700 5.5 12.9
313,454 5.7 12.5
753,643 6.6 10.9
L---------------------------------------------------~-----------------------
Average
Annual Doubling
Holdings Growth Time
1960 1938 -60 1938-60
(volumes) (per cent) (years)
6,697,111 2.4 29.2
4,394,988 2.2 31.9
2,875,761 2.7 26.0
1,626,5 37 2.6 27.0
1,665 ,114 2.9 24.2
1,025,479 3.0 23 .4
1,025,944 4.9 14 .5
966,390 5.4 13 .2
907,452 5.6 12 .7
399,567 2.0 35.0
2,158,434 2.8 25.1
Average
Annual Doubling
Holdings Growth Time
1960 1938-60 1938-60
(volumes) (per cent) ( years)
2,094,824 2.4 29.2
2,503,060 3.6 19.6
3,288,158 5.0 14:2
2,116,230 3.3 21.3
1,968,101 3.0 23.4
755,000 1.8 38.8
1,021,441 3.9 18.1
544,494 1.6 43.7
696,630 3.5 20.1
522,549 2.3 30.5
1,510,487 3.2 22.0
ever, that the rate of growth for .a given
library does or should remain invariable
throughout the library's existence, or
that the growth rates of all comparable
libraries should be the same or closely
similar, considering the great number of
internal and external educational and
economic factors affecting library acqui-
sition. The commonly quoted values of
fifteen , sixteen, or twenty years for "nor-
mal" or "average" or "typical" doubling
times need not be accepted as such. In-
deed, there appears to be no obvious
reason why Rider considered fifteen or
sixteen years typical. On the basis of his
own computations of value thirteen years
for doubling would be more typical for
the twenty "university" libraries he stud-
ied.
The significance of the growth rate as
a meaningful datum remains to be estab-
lished. Rider's state.ment that " ... we
may assert this as almost axiomatic: un-
less a college or university is willing ...
not to maintain its place in the steady
flow of cultural development, it seems to
be inevitable that it must double its li-
brary in size every fifteen or twenty
years" 4 seems to establish rate of growth
as a datum independent of the basis up-
on which this growth occurs, i.e.) the ab-
solute size of the holdings. That is, it
doesn't matter how large a library is, as
long as it grows rapidly. As the size of the
library increases, the annual increments
necessary to support <;t rate of growth
which will result in doubling every fif-
teen or twenty years become very large,
and, if projected very 'far, become astro-
nomical in size. This fact very likely
caused Metcalf, in 1954, to say, "When
a library has reached maturity ... if its
book collections increase very much more
than 21;2 per cent a year, the library is
growing more rapidly than it should."5
4 Rider, op. cit., p. 11.
5 K. D. Metcalf, "Spatial Problems in University
Libraries" Library Trends, Il ' (1954), 559.
MAY 1963
That is, if it is large enough, it need
not and should not grow rapidly.
But these contradictory quotations
are, after all, subjective evaluations, al-
though made, to be sure, by eminent and
respected authorities. Axford has used
a more objective measure of the rele-
vance of a library's growth rate to . the
academic quality of its parent institu-
tion. Using an available academic rank-
ing of institutions offering graduate
study in many fields Axford concluded
that "Rider's emphasis on the positive
relationship between the rate of growth
of the university library and the over-
all quality of the educational program
is still essentially correct."6 Again, ques-
tionable selection, listing, and analysis
of the data appear to have lead to de-
batable conclusions.
Dean Haywood Keniston, in the course
of an educational survey of the Univer-
sity of Pennsylvania7 constructed a rank
order of universities based upon the ex-
cellence of their graduate teaching and
research programs in the arts ·and sci-
ences, as rated by a large number of
graduate deans and departmental chair-
men in their specialities throughout the
nation's leading universities. This rat-
ing was accepted by Bernard Berelsons
as being essentially sound, and was used
by him in many of the comparisons in
his work, although he added the Cali-
fornia Institute of Technology and the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
to the top twenty schools, for purposes
~ot. relevant here. Keniston's study was
hmited to those institutions offering
graduate study in a wide variety of fields.
If, however, certain rank orders of
library data for the twenty institutions
(omitting M.I.T. and CalTech because
they have academic offerings in only a
6 Axford, op . cit., p. 347.
.
7 Haywood Kenis~on, Graduate . Study and Research
m t~e Arts f!nd Sclf!nces at _the University of Pennsyl-
van~a. (Philadelphia: Umve rsit y of Pennsylvania
Press, 1959).
8 _Be rn ard Berelson, Gradt{ate Education in the
Umted States. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1960).
227
TABLE 3
CoRRELATIONS AMONG UNIVERSITY AcADEMic RANKING,
LIBRARY HOLDINGS, AND GROWTH RATE
LIBRARY LIBRARY AVERAGE ANNUAL
HOLDINGS HOLDINGS GROWTH RATE
Keniston- 1946
INSTITUTION Berelson
Rank
Million Order
Vo.lumes
Top ten:
4.80 Harvard I
California (Berkeley) 2 1.38
Columbia 3 1.78
Yale 4 3.54
Michigan 5 1.27
Chicago 6 1.58
Princeton . 7 1.06
Wisconsin 8 0.60
Cornell 9 1.21
Illinois 10 2.00
Second ten:
Pennsylvania 11 1.03
Minnesota 12 1.42
Stanford 13 0.95
California (Los Angeles) 14 0.54
Indiana 15 0.62
Johns Hopkins 16 0.74
Northwestern 17 0.79
Ohio I8 0.71
New York 19 0.72
Washington (Seattle) 20 0.59
Correlation Coefficient
with Keniston-Berelson
Rank Order
limited number of fields and relatively
small libraries) are compared with the
actual Keniston-Berelson rank order
(Table 3) a different conclusion must
be reached. The correlation between
Keniston-Berelson rank order and li-
brary growth rate rank order during the
last fourteen years (r = -.24) is not sig-
nificant. On the other hand, the correla-
tion between the Keniston-Berelson rank
order and the rank order of absolute
size of library holdings is highly signifi-
cant for 1946 hpldings (r = .76), and even
more spectacula~ly significant for 1960
holdings (r = .87).
Berelson reported that he had en-
countered, in interview, some dispute
as to the validity of the Keniston aca-
demic ranking in some specific areas.
1960 1946-60
Rank Million Rank Rank
Order Vo.lumes Order Per Cent Order
I 6.70 I 2.4 I7
7 2.50 6 4.4 6
4 2.88 4 3.5 I2.5
2 4.39 2 1.6 20
8 2.82 5 5.9 3
5 2.09 8 2.0 I9
10 1.63 11 3.1 15
18 1.38 15 6.2 2
9 2.12 7 4.1 9
3 3.29 3 3.6 11
11 1.67 10 3.5 12.5
6 1.97 9 2.3 18
12 1.59 12 3.7, 10
20 1.46 13 7.3 1
17 1.32 17 5.6 4
14 1.16 18 3.3 14
13 1.43 14 4.3 7
16 1.37 16 4.8 5
15 1.07 19 2.9 16
19 1.06 20 4.2 8
.76 .87 -.24
Answering these en ticisms, he reports,
would result in moving a given institu-
tion one or at most two places up or
down on the list, and this would make
very little difference in the values of the
coefficients of correlation. Whatever crit-
icisms of the detailed ranking he en-
countered were obviated by using the
ranking in the two clusters of top ten
and second ten, and it is in this form
that Berelson used it in most of his
analyses. He reports almost complete
agreement with the ranking as used in
this way.
Using such clusters in comparing li-
brary size and growth data with aca-
demic ranking (Table 4) leads to the
same conclusions as does the calculation
of coefficients of correlation. The mean
228 COLLEGE AND .- RESEARCH LIBRARIES
TABLE 4
LIBRARY HOLDINGS AND GROWTH OF GRADUATE STUDY INSTITUTIONS
Mean
Keniston- Holdings
Berelson 1946
Ranking (volumes)
Top Ten . 1,922,174
Second Ten 811,555
Other AGS Members 523,640
of the top ten institutions had over twice
as many volumes in 1946 and 1960 as
did the mean of second ten institutions
and over three times as many volumes as
the mean of unranked other institutions
belonging to the Association of Graduate
Schools. 9 During the period of study the
mean of top ten institutions added al-
most twice as many volumes as the mean
of second ten institutions and almost
three times as many as the mean of other
unranked AGS members. At the same
time, the mean growth rate of the lat-
ter two clusters was significantly higher
than the growth rate of the mean ' top
ten institutions.
This comparison is probably even
more meaningful than is the comparison
of rank order correlations. Not only does
it avoid the minute determination and
comparison of library holdings, data
which are somewhat unreliable, but of
even greater importance, it shows that
the magnitude of yearly gross holdings
additions, like the holdings themselves,
are of more significance than growth
rate in determining library quality.
That the absolute size of a university
library's holdings and the absolute size
of its yearly gross increments, and not
its current growth rate, are the best
measures of its quality has other con-
firmation, as Fussier has pointed out.10
Those large university libraries, notably
9 Relevant size figu.res were readily av'ailable for only
fourteen of these unranked institutio.ns.
10 H. H. Fussier, personal communication, October
5, 1962.
MAY 1963
Mean Mean Mean Annual Mean
Holdings Additions Growth Rate Doubling Time
1960 1946-60 1946-6 0 1946-60
(volumes) (volumes) (per cent) (years)
2,979,923 1,057,749 3.2 22.0
1,409,364 597,809 4.0 17.7
905 ,607 381,967 4.0 17.7
Chicago and Yale, which are carrying
out weeding programs, adversely affect
their growth rates thereby. At the same
time, they are undoubtedly improving
their libraries and they remain in the
upper ranks of research institutions in
spite of having very low growth rates,
because they remain large libraries add-
ing large yearly increments to their hold-
ings. On the basis of growth rates alone
they would be considered to be in sad
decline.
Strong positive correlation between
two sets of data does not in itself estab-
lish causal connection between them.
The existence of high correlation be-
tween absolute size of library holdings
and the academic quality of an institu-
tion's graduate program does not estab-
lish that the former causes the latter any
more than that the latter causes the for-
mer. It does suggest strongly, however,
that the two are not independent-very
likely cause and effect are intertwined,
as Clapp has concluded. "And just as
good graduate students are attracted to
good teachers, so the good scholars are
attracted to institutions having good li-
braries. And-and this is the whole
point-libraries which are good for the
diversity of interests which are repre-
sented in a university faculty necessarily
are or soon become large libraries.11
••
11 Verner Clapp, "Graduate Education and Library
Resources," Journal of the Graduate Research Center
(of Southern Methodist University), XXX (1962), 51.
229